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The Fashion Conspiracy

The worst thing about fashion? The way it betrays you.

Everybody has their style and it evolves, naturally, but the single most crushing moment in a young person's life is when they realise how their style has branded them. The devastation continues if, unfortunately, your style originated from the pages of a magazine. Your idol- the one person who can do no wrong, who is funny when offensive and cool when downright inelegant. A person's idol is an expression of their alter ego and the influence this person has is massive. The betrayal when you discover that everything that defined this person was a marketing drive, is also pretty big. The real blow comes when you discover the creator' was someone not too dissimilar to your own father. It's enough to make one itch.

Linkin Park were the worst offenders of the last decade. Not only did they do this, but they blatantly poked fun at their fans during the high point of the craze by calling their album Hybrid Theory'. There was nothing hybrid' about them, it should have been called Clich Theory'. Their image, songs, sound, everything was calculated (manufactured is the word of choice, but there was more thought than that connotes) it was measured with business plans and units sold'. Some fat guy from a record company approached 6 tattoo artists and asked them if they wanted to be rich and famous for two years.

The marketing began with the look. You clap eyes on these guys and you think yeah their fan base is circa 17+' but 17- 25 is the most poverty stricken age bracket. Fact. This was actually a ploy by EMI (or whoever) to con the 13-15 age bracket into buying anything and everything with the band logo on because this is what the older kids do and they're cool. The 13-15 age bracket, at that time, was the real cash cow as they were young enough to still wager pester power but old enough to choose their own clothes. Behold point 2; the clothes- Linkin Park didn't actually release a lot of music, they just played off the back of the same album for phase one of their fame and even that lacked creativity. Linkin Park was an image so then we had every other 14 year old wearing black baggy trousers and vest tops, some even wore glasses because geeks have had the official go ahead to be cool by now too. To complete the movement, the fans of this and similar music needed a common noun to be labelled with. They were called a variety of things depending on where you lived and who you were asking, but the

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